The Knight With Two Swords

by Edward M. Erdelac

  He let out a groan and shuddered.

  Balin held him close.

  “I promise,” he said. “And I will find this evil knight and avenge you. I swear it.”

  But the knight heard nothing of that. He was dead.

  Balin cleaned the nameless man and rolled his body in a blanket and tied him over the saddle of his horse.

  He prayed that God would accept the knight’s soul.

  He knew the animal would not go much further today. Still, he did not wish to camp in the open meadow beside the stream now that he knew there was an invisible murderer about, so he led Ironprow and the tired horse and its dead master into the mouth of the forest, where he felt he had a better chance of avoiding an ambush such as he’d seen.

  Yet what could he truly do, if this Garlon decided to come skulking in the night to push a dagger under his chin?

  He made camp just within the forest, unsaddled and rubbed down the knight’s horse, and laid his body gently in the ditch.

  He spent the night in his armor, sitting with his back to a moss covered old oak, his swords in his hands, dozing, but never quite sleeping.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Balin jolted awake at the sound of horses approaching from deeper in the wood. It was well past dawn. He took up his swords and lurched into the road, joints aching from having slept in his harness.

  Two riders came trotting around the bend in the woods. Their mounts were startled to rearing by his crazed appearance, brandishing his swords like a brigand in the road.

  It was a knight and his lady.

  More, it was the Hibernian, Sir Lanceor and his lady, Princess Colombe.

  They looked to have been on the road for some time. The lady’s hair and dress bore all the signs of having slept for some time beneath the stars, and their palfreys were shaggy and ungroomed. Lanceor’s armor was mud splattered and bore a film of trail dust. His put upon young squire came up behind, plodding along with a bow-necked pack horse bearing his lance and all the accoutrements of a long journey.

  Balin stammered a mostly unintelligible greeting, he was so astonished to meet them.

  They blinked at the sight of him, as if waking from a long sleep, and Lanceor immediately grew animate.

  “At long last!” he declared with a broad grin. “When I had given up hope of finding you, here you are. Praise God!”

  “Have you sought me, Sir Lanceor?”

  “For a week or more, aye, but no longer. Now is my quest fulfilled. Now do I bring you the overdue justice of the King.”

  He turned in his saddle to gesture hurriedly at his squire, who was already working to remove his helm and lance from the back of the packhorse.

  “What are you talking about?” Balin asked, blinking in confusion.

  “Don’t play the fool. To think I rode all the way to your cursed Northumberland to find you and was given over to returning empty handed. But here I have caught you practicing the highwayman’s trade at the very doorstep of Camelot.”

  “I’m no robber, you fool.”

  “No, not when facing your betters you’re not,” Lanceor scoffed, as his squire ran up and passed his helm to him.

  He pointed to the body of the murdered knight bundled in the ditch.

  “No robber, yet you lead an empty horse and hide a body in the ditch.”

  “I’m not hiding anything, you clod,” Balin said, his old annoyance at the Hibernian prince rising in him, dispensing with all courtesy. “I saw this knight killed by an invisible rider, and I’ve sworn to bear his body to Meliot Castle and see him buried.”

  “An invisible rider!” Lanceor laughed, sliding his helm over his head. “And I have sworn to ride you down, you murderous villain, on the order of Arthur himself.”

  Balin’s heart sank. Was it true? Had Arthur sent this fool to kill him?

  “I don’t believe it,” Balin said resolutely.

  “What you believe hardly matters,” said Lanceor, grabbing his lance from the squire. “Arthur put me to your scent not an hour after you slew the Lady of The Lake. I lost your trail in the forest, but now I’ll put an end to your mischief.”

  Balin shook his head.

  “The King must have forgotten your quest.”

  Lanceor laughed again, as though such a thing were impossible.

  Colombe, silent at her prince’s side, now looked concerned.

  “Hear me,” said Balin anxiously. “You said you have been riding for a week. Then you cannot know all that has happened.”

  “What has happened?” Colombe asked.

  Lanceor looked sharply at her.

  “My lady,” Balin said, bowing his head seeing in her a reasoning spirit, “Carhaix was attacked by Rience and Lot with their Saxon allies, but they have been defeated. The Saxons have been routed and the rebellion is over. Lot is dead. He is even now being entombed in Camelot, and King Arthur is to wed Princess Guinevere in a few days’ time.”

  Colombe looked open mouthed at her prince.

  He was locking his lance into its fittings, unconcerned.

  “Even if all that were true, it does nothing to stay your sentence,” said Lanceor.

  “It does,” Balin said. “I fought at Carhaix. I charged at Arthur’s right. I slew Sir Segurant The Brown. I was pardoned.”

  Lanceor’s only answer was to slam down the visor of his helmet.

  “Lanceor!” Colombe protested. “What if what he says his true?”

  “Stay your tongue, woman, you do not know the lies a villain will tell.”

  “They are not lies,” Balin said angrily. “I am pardoned, I tell you. I have a place at the Round Table.”

  Lanceor scoffed.

  “You see how his falsehoods grow, my sweet? Next he will tell me he is Arthur’s chosen champion. From ragamuffin prisoner to glorious hero in less than a fortnight. Ready yourself, savage. One of us is going to lie down in this road in a little while.”

  The Hibernian turned his horse and rode a respectable distance up the road, turning once more to face Balin. His palfrey pawed at the ground and he fancied he saw it glower at him beneath its barding, a mirror of its rider’s determined arrogance.

  Balin bunched his fists.

  Colombe looked from Lanceor to Balin, anxiously. There was pleading in her soft eyes, but Balin dismissed it with an angry, exasperated swipe of his hand.

  “Alright, you Hibernian popinjay,” said Balin through his teeth. “Let God judge the truth!”

  “Don’t blaspheme, you shameful damned blackguard,” Lanceor called. “You will stand before Him in a little while, and you will have to answer for your tongue.”

  Balin stalked angrily off the road and unfastened Ironprow, hauling himself up into the saddle alone. He didn’t bother with his helmet. In his outrage, he took only shield and lance and urged the destrier into the center of the road to face his opponent.

  Lanceor’s squire pulled at the bridle of Colombe’s palfrey, trying to extricate her from harm’s way.

  “Get out of the way, Colombe!” Lanceor roared.

  “Sirs!” Colombe called to them both as the squire struggled with her horse. “This is rash and will come to no good end! We should take this before Arthur or some other impartial…”

  But Lanceor had kicked his horse and was charging, even before she was out of his path.

  The squire got her clear with a final effort.

  Balin roared and stabbed Ironprow’s flanks with his spurs, perhaps too exuberantly. The horse launched itself up the road. He had less momentum than Lanceor now and was at a disadvantage.

  But he would dive willingly into hell rather than let this ill-mannered, soft-bellied, wine-guzzling Hibernian fop unhorse him today.

  He leaned forward and leveled his lance.

  He saw Lanceor, a hurtling thing of steel and blazing plumage peering out from the depths of his helm over the lip of his shield, which bore: Azure, three crowns in pale, or, bordure argent.

  A royal charge, the three white crowns of hi
s father, King Elidus, borne by Hibernian royalty since before Vortigern’s day.

  Balin was a poor knight, the son and brother of poor knights. To his heart that royal crest was as haughty a thing as the scornful manner of its bearer. It enraged him that a wealthy man might be born into the title “nobility,” when this prideful whelp who bullied his lady and drank to excess like a common tavern lout was as far from embodying the noble qualities of a man as a rat was from the High Crown of Albion.

  How many wealthy knights had he known were worth the rich arms they bore? How many did not kick the peasantry from their path like chickens, or cuff tardy servants, or speak in whispered laughs about the shabby appearance of their own peers if they came up from the lesser ranks?

  He had no doubt his own father had suffered such insults from so-called men even worse than Lanceor.

  As the clash became imminent, he steeled himself, and in his wrathful heart demanded of God in heaven, demanded, not begged, swift and total victory over this unworthy princeling.

  Lanceor’s spear touched his shield and he angled it away, feeling it slide along, glancing, scraping, whereas Balin’s own lance struck that blue field of white crowns dead center and somehow found a miniscule but fatal flaw in the shield’s design. Steel pierced steel and rammed through almost to the hilt before the wood handle shook and shattered in Balin’s fist, and he released it as he passed, his hand thrumming.

  Balin pulled back hard on the reins and turned, ready for a second pass, grabbing his swords.

  Lanceor still had his lance, but he had stopped and was not regrouping. His palfrey shook its head and slowly turned about.

  Balin sat aghast at the sight of him, and murmured aloud, “Heaven!”

  Balin’s lance had pierced Lanceor’s shield and pinned it to his chest. It was an impossible stroke. He had never seen, never even heard of such a thing ever happening. How had the lance survived punching through three layers of steel? Its dark tip protruded at a skyward angle from Lanceor’s back as he slumped forward against the neck of his horse, which swiftly ran with bloody rivulets, causing it to rear, spilling Lanceor with a clatter into the road before trotting past the thunderstruck Balin, shaking the blood from its mane.

  Balin turned to watch the horse disappear around the bend in the road. It was a surreal sight, slow and dreamlike, the blood stark against the palfrey’s pale snowy hide.

  Then he nearly leapt from his armor at the spine-raking shriek that sounded from Colombe.

  Balin watched her, distraught, drop from her saddle.

  The squire tried to restrain her but she shoved him to the ground, hiked up her dress, and ran to her fallen lover, skidding to her knees beside him.

  Balin opened his mouth as the woman fell across the dead man.

  Had he really done this? Had he really prayed for it?

  Had God answered him? What other explanation could there be for such a colossal stroke?

  He swallowed, heart hammering, face flushing at the sound of Colombe’s heart breaking. She heaved uncontrollable shrieks into the corpse of her man, wrested out strangled entreaties, and was met only with the silence of the dead.

  He urged Ironprow closer.

  He passed the young squire, on his knees in the ditch, wild tears cutting through the mud on his face. The boy was scarping up clots of dirt and flinging them down again in feral grief.

  Had Lanceor touched this boy’s heart so? How? It seemed impossible that the loutish, boorish prince had been so well regarded.

  But then he came to Colombe, and as he dismounted, she snapped upright at the sound of his greaves clinking. This was no playacted grief. She was destroyed. Her lovely face was drawn near to splitting, lips in a leering grimace, cheeks blotched fire red, her eyes running with tears to match the copious life that pooled scarlet around her knees.

  He fully expected her to spring for him, tear him to shreds in her outrage.

  But her grief was too great to leave room for wrath, even. She wailed like a ghost as she struggled to form words that came out in breathless bursts.

  “Oh…Sir Balin…it is two bodies…you have slain here.”

  She lifted Lanceor’s lifeless hand and gently took off his gauntlet to press it to her breast.

  She kissed it, rocked with it as though it were a newborn babe, dried her tears with the pale back of it.

  “Two bodies…in one….heart, and…one heart in…two bodies,” she babbled into his dead knuckles.

  She leaned over him again, like a penitent.

  Balin reached out to her, unsure of what to do to comfort her. He had never seen such grief, not since he had seen Brulen while their mother burned. It embarrassed him, more so because he felt less than miniscule for having caused it. He was wretched. Lanceor had been right. He truly was a villain.

  Colombe fumbled with Lanceor’s helmet and slid it off at last, then planted loud kisses all over his still face.

  She had loved this man, and Balin had slain him, even called on the Lord in his sinful rage to aid him.

  Colombe straightened a second time, and rose shakily to her feet, the front of her dress stained with Lanceor’s blood. As she rose, the dead prince’s sword rasped from its sheath and dangled from her hand.

  She looked at Balin, calmer now, her eyes placid and faraway.

  He backed away warily. Now would she strike him?

  “And one soul,” she murmured.

  Then she turned the sword over in her hands, let the pommel touch the road, and flung herself forward.

  Balin lunged, but he couldn’t stop the point of the blade from sprouting like a steel sapling from the middle of her back with a rip of skin and fabric. There was one horrid, dwindling shriek of agony.

  She twitched across the body of Lanceor, then lay unmoving.

  Balin wavered on his unsteady legs and then pitched backward. He fell on his rear in the road.

  The squire wailed, an orphan’s lament, and ran off, directionless as a frightened fawn into the trees.

  It was just as the image on the sword had foretold.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In the wake of the death of Lile, a new priestess had ascended to the office of the Lady of The Lake, and Merlin came into her parqueted hall to dutifully present himself.

  He knew her of course, as he knew most of the women of Avalon. As a natural or perhaps unnatural font of latent infernal power and occult knowledge, most all of the sisterhood had come to slake their individual thirsts at his spring at one time or another, and being of a puckish nature, he had exchanged many secrets to them for their attentions.

  The Lady Viviane was no different. Being the daughter of the Baron of Briosque in sensuous Gallia, if the old adages were to be believed, she was perhaps most equal to him in terms of amorous prowess. Truly she understood most of all the women of Avalon the inherent power of her own womanhood, and her efforts to educate her sister priestesses in recognizing and harnessing that power in themselves had begun to frustrate Merlin’s bartering, and to put a damper on his already sparse leisure.

  She had learned much from Merlin and taught him a good deal. She was level-headed and calculating. She would make a formidable Lady of The Lake, but would her rule be friendly to his purposes? She made very little of her opinions known. She had served Lile dutifully and without question, but would she uphold all that Lile and Merlin had planned together? Would she approve of a compromise between the Goddess and the crucified god?

  He found her not in her rich audience chamber, but reclining on a marble bench in the sun in her back garden, glorious in her samite gown, observing a surpassingly handsome young man expertly maneuvering a horse through the apple orchard at a dangerous pace.

  Merlin was amused at the swell of jealousy he felt observing Viviane’s appreciative eye on the young rider. That was the sort of power she wielded. It could not be taught in any grimoire.

  He cleared his throat, and after a moment, she took her eyes off the young man to acknowledge him.


  She was slightly older than Merlin, but the enchanted air of Avalon, which was a province of Fluratrone, the land of the faeries, had served her. One would have thought her a blushing maiden of cream skin and thread of gold hair but for her frank and worldly eyes which were the same blue that called mariners past their prime back to sea to die.

  In his youth, Merlin had visited her home country with his foster father Blaise to deliver the extreme unction to her father. The old man had told them he had once spared a wounded white hart while hunting in the forest, and Viviane had been given the blessing of the moon goddess, Diane, herself.

  Merlin didn’t doubt it. She was damnably alluring.

  “Merlin, so you have come at last.”

  “As always, to vouchsafe my service, Lady,” Merlin said, bowing slightly.

  She smiled and returned her gaze to the young rider, who was urging his horse to vault over moss covered boulders now, using only his strong knees as he spread his lean arms like a bird in flight, fearless and trusting wholly in the animal not to throw him.

  The horse was frothing with sweat, as was its rider, who opened his tunic and let the wind fill it.

  Merlin rolled his eyes at the gaudy display, and Viviane’s barely perceptible but undeniable appreciation of the well-muscled form of the rider.

  This was the boy Viviane herself had taken from Benwick in Gaul at the behest of Lile all those years ago. The loyal champion that she had insisted on raising to insinuate among Arthur’s company, to insure a true knight of Avalon sat at The Round Table. Besides Merlin and the Red Knight who guarded the entrance to the castle, he was the only male allowed on the enchanted shore.

  “Have you reclaimed the Adventurous Sword for young Lancelot?” Viviane asked, smiling as the youth in question executed a particularly bold leap and urged his horse on, laughing gamely.

  “Are you certain he could claim it if I had?”